Man Man / the Lovely Feathers

When we (critics and fans) say (over and over) that Man Man sounds like Waits, Zappa, and Beefheart, we mean a number of things: They’re gruff and enigmatic; they superimpose glum beauty over blacksmith-shop clangor; they’re crazy, but they learned how to play their instruments before they got that way, so technique and abandon gel; they wear facial hair of ineffable significance; they like to bang on shit and accentuate the atavistic qualities of various exotic genres; their music's too personal for us to comfortably perceive as anything except high-concept shtick; and it's much easier to figure out what they're not-- e.g., a rock band, ironic joke, confrontational noise thing, throwback, academic pastiche, ad infinitum-- than what they are: An invitation to rapt speechlessness. These are the facts, insofar as we can perceive them, but only the final item has anything to do with what happens when Man Man gets onstage.

Opening act the Lovely Feathers are no slouch in the crazy department, and during their set, symptoms of St. Vitus Dance manifested throughout the audience. There was something sweet about how the Feathers' keyboard player stood in bright yellow superhero spandex amid the otherwise normally dressed band, as if it were less a presentation element than his personal trip. The Feathers' arch spaz-rock had plenty to recommend it-- galloping guitars and trilling keys, long unraveling melodies, rollercoaster time signatures, an allusion to the guitar lick from Geto Boys' "My Mind Playin' Tricks on Me", a rail-thin Alec Ounsworth look-alike petulantly sassing the mic and a second singer with a tragedy mask's tormented moue. Plenty of personality, but there's a totality to Man Man's set that cancels out anything that borders it, and in the end the Lovely Feathers were easily reducible to a sui generic (not a typo) Pixies spin-off.

Here are some more facts about Man Man: They're from Philly. They dressed all in white, with white war-paint streaked under their eyes. They all sang big full-throated man chants; they all seemed to play several instruments at once, and "instruments" should be interpreted loosely-- not only guitars, accordions, saxophones, and keys, but steel buckets, toys, spoons, and bowls of water. They sang about falling out of love in Brooklyn and falling out in general. They swooned mightily together or epileptically jittered in sundry directions at invisible psychic cues, imposing a pantomimed theatricality upon their very real transportation. There were no breaks in their set, so the music deeply respired like something large that was asleep, and that you hoped would not wake up, which of course it did, at uneven intervals: The beast's heavy lids fluttered as such feces-smeared crackups as "Young Einstein on the Beach", or the demented moustache mantra of "Push the Eagle's Stomach", and the bone-granulating "Fee-fi-fo-fum" of "Engwish Bwudd" came tear-assing through the smoldering wreckage of waltzes, accordion-fueled gypsy folk, shuddering shanties. Then Honus Honus climbed his stool and lulled it back to slumber with an invisible conductor's baton. But this was all just smoke and thunder. Man Man's power isn't derived from the genres they stumble across, or the maniac light in their eyes, or the sweat pooling in their beards. It's the unbearable sadness in their marrow and how they transform it, like the existentially distressed but heroically steadfast men men they are, into a terrible and lionhearted joy.